This time of year is a nightmare for people like me. The air is absolutely swarming with pollen, and that's sending my hayfever into overdrive. Right now I honestly can't tell whether this is a symptom of a cold-like illness, or if Mother Nature has decided to take out her frustrations on my sinuses.
Thankfully for those of you suffering like me in the U.S., Google has started rolling out a helpful feature to the Pixel-exclusive weather app: A pollen tracker (via 9to5Google).
The idea is that Pixel Weather will predict how bad the pollen count will be over the next few days. That way you know to prepare yourself with medication or, in more extreme circumstances, seal up your doors and windows and refuse to go outside.
The feature has already been available in multiple regions around the world already, including Germany, Italy, France and the U.K. For that reason I've already been using Google's pollen tracker for the last few weeks.
How Pixel Weather's Pollen tracker works
The Pollen tracker on Pixel has been built to show you pollen levels from 3 different kinds of plants — grass, tree and weeds. The widget shows you current levels for all three plants, with 4 different levels of severity: low, medium, high and "severe".
Naturally, Google has employed a traffic light color scheme to make that clear at a glance. But you can get more information by tapping the widget and opening up a dedicated "Pollen" information page.
The most important part of the Pollen page is that it has a forecast for all 3 pollen types. Grass and weeds show you levels for the next two days, while the tree pollen page shows you a little further — up to 4 days into the future.
The idea is that you can plan ahead, but that's not been doing me much good. When the tree pollen has been stuck as either severe or high for the past few weeks, there isn't much you can do than self-medicate and get on with your day.
Though the fact levels will be dropping to "medium" towards the end of the week gives me some hope that my eye will stop watering all day long.
It's more than just forecasting
The pollen widget offers a bit more than just a future pollen forecast. It also shows you what kind of pollen is prominent on any given day, and when that pollen tends to be around.
Right now I can see that today's tree pollen consists of Oak, Alder, Ash, Birch and Olive. All of them are prevalent during spring time, though Alder, Ash and Birch also apparently pollinate in late winter. So hopefully they'll be calming down in the next few weeks.
Google also includes various other plants that may produce a cross reaction. According to this, having a reaction to grass pollen also puts you at greater risk of various food allergies, including oranges, tomatoes, peanuts, potatoes and other legumes.
I didn't know this, and I hope that the AI that put this together is a little more accurate than the AI Overviews in Google Search.
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